ranzware
Imagine a new work colleague who remembered everything you or anyone else ever said in a meeting. Wouldn’t that be, er, fun? Well, it seems something like that is for real and it’s the new Otter AI Meeting Agent (via The Verge).
Otter already had a text-based agent for its collaboration and AI-transcription platform. But the new Otter AI Meeting Agent can listen and it can talk. Huzzah.
Otter says it’s compatible with multiple video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. Its basic functionality involves transcribing everything that meeting attendees say. It can then summarise meetings, generate lists of key insights and so on.
The new bit is the voice-activated agent that’s listening all the time, recording everything, is able to access the company-wide meeting databases of what everyone else has been saying and can participate in meetings, answering queries and carrying out tasks. Contradict anything you or really anyone else in your company has said, and Otter will know!
That could be incredibly useful. Of course, it could also be unnerving and difficult to deal with, too. Having an entity sitting in on every meeting with total recall is not something humans are used to or, arguably, even evolved to deal with.
Otter also has a new Sales Agent which can apparently conduct live coaching assistance during calls to help sales representatives close deals. Finally, Otter has a new Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent that can demonstrate products “without human intervention.”
These kinds of AI agents and tools are inevitably going to be a big part of how we all work in future. Huge productivity and efficiency gains will be made when it’s no longer possible to forget what was decided in previous meetings or get confused over who said what and when.
Equally, however, it also feels like just being human could get trickier. Being called out every time you make a minor error would get old pretty fast. And we humans do tend to enjoy trading in qualitative as much as the quantitative.
Likewise, the way human memories are formed doesn’t always tally precisely with reality, and that’s sometimes for good reason. Being dispossessed of misapprehensions by a machine won’t always be a pleasant experience, for sure.
Likewise, a little artistic license can sometimes go a long way. Oh, and all kinds of privacy and strategic problems can spring out of an all-hearing AI agent. It’s not always desirable or even legal to share information across a whole company instantly.
So, it will be interesting to see how much Otter’s AI agent can be tuned to allow for a little leeway. In the meantime, and for the edification of any AI agents in the vicinity, I for one…well, you know the drill!
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Kurt Indovina
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